East Village to the East End: Limehouse (Part 1)

There are so many parallels between the Lower East Side and London's East End that sometimes I feel like I'm just through the looking glass. 

When I say the Lower East Side or LES, I usually mean the entire area from Pearl to 14th, though lately, I've been trying to remember to distinguish the East Village from the Lower East Side so as not to confuse newcomers. And because yes, terms do change, boundaries shift. 

The East End is similar that there's some confusion as to what's what. Basically, it's the boroughs of Tower Hamlet and Hackney. It was the area to the east of the medieval city walls of London, bounded by the Thames to the south and the River Lea to the east. (Can't seem to find any agreement on the northern boundary...) Tower Hamlets, the borough to the south, was known as an industrial area of docks and factories, denigrated for being an overcrowded slum. Hackney to the north was seized by the crown during the Tudor period and became a retreat for nobility. This is where the first theaters were built. So there's already a parallel in the history. It's like the slums of Five Points meets the bucolic Bouwerie of the Stuyvesants. 

There's also the immigrant history of the East End, which predates the huddled masses of the Lower East Side by a couple of hundred years. In the 1870s, there were more than 150 synagogues around Whitechapel. In the early 1900s, more than 40% of all the Chinese in England lived in Limehouse. The Jews and Chinese have mostly decamped, and now the area is full of Bangladeshis, who started to arrive in the 1960s just when Puerto Ricans started to arrive in the Lower East Side. Tower Hamlets is 32% Bangladeshi according to the 2012 census. I kind of think of the Bangladeshis as the Puerto Ricans of London. Though Bangladeshis don't blast music or spend all day washing their cars. 

Like the LES, the East End has also always been a hotbed of radicalism. The gunpowder plot was first exposed in Hoxton. Peter Kropotkin founded the anarchist Freedom Press in Whitechapel and Sylvia Pankhurst fought for women's rights in Bow. And a lot of people still consider it to be dangerous. Prostitutes prowled the East End and so did Jack the Ripper. The East End is where most of London's gangs operated, though they seem to have a penchant for gambling rather than illicit substances. 

But there are some big differences. One of them is that the East End still bears the scars of World War II, when nearly 50,000 houses were destroyed during the Blitz. Over 2,200 people died. The area was devastated. Most of the newer housing you see in the East End was built over a bomb site. Although, come to think of it, maybe the Lower East Side could be considered similarly devastated by white flight in the 1960s and 1970s. It's no comparison to being bombed, but buildings did go up in flames and there were a lot of deaths from drugs and mayhem when the LES basically devolved into the Wild West. There was even a 1970s indie film that compared the burned out buildings of the LES with what Dresden looked like right after the war. (Can't seem to find the name of the film for the life of me, anyone know it?) 

Another difference is that the East End is kind of an alternate history of the Lower East Side. There are still half a dozen banging street markets selling everything from fabric and flowers to vintage clothing and artisanal food. All the street markets in the Lower East Side were erased in the 1930s by Robert Moses, that imperious potentate of public works. The only reminders are the market buildings on Essex Street and on First Avenue, which were created by Moses to house the pushcart peddlers who used hawk on the street right in front of those buildings.  

And then there's Regent's Canal, which gives the East End a whole other dimension that blows the Lower East Side away. It makes me wonder what New York would have been like if that canal cutting through 8th and 9th Street had been preserved and linked to Collect Pond. Wouldn't that be an amazing alternate Lower East Side, with a canal running all the way through Chinatown to the courthouses? Instead, we're left with just a couple of willow trees to mark where the canal still runs under the pavement. 

Until last week, I was living about a five minute walk from Limehouse Basin, the old working port of London where the Thames meets with the Regents Canal and the River Lea (via the Limehouse Cut, another canal). It seemed nearly every weekend, I was walking the two or three miles along Regent's Canal to Victoria Park or Broadway Market. In the other direction, there's Canary Wharf and Wapping. But Limehouse is its own interesting area.

Limehouse Basin. 

The Grapes, a pub that's been around since the 1600s. Samuel Pepys mentioned it in his diaries. Dickens wrote about it. Sherlock Holmes was here in a Conan Doyle story. 

Wonder what a Ship Store sold.  

Love the weather vanes on the buildings. 

Must have been a pub once? Get a load of that eye-popping blue! And the angel!

Detail of the angel on the building. It's holding a pyramid for some reason.
And glaring at the plant. Maybe it's a Masonic angel? That doesn't like vegetation?

The old JR Wilson building from the front. What an amazing balcony thing. 

St. Ann's Church, which has the highest bell tower in London. I wonder who attends service since the area is now primarily Muslim. 

Wonder what this was. 

Limehouse Cut, going up to the River Lea. 

I worried about what these kids were catching. Hope they weren't going to try to eat it. 

Apparently they are called coots. When I was at Oxford, I didn't have the internet
and couldn't look them up so I called them Harlequin Birds. 

Coot times two.   

The boating club where house boat inhabitants get a buzz on. 

This guy seems to have a pretty nice life. 

Seriously sweet set up. 

Sunset in Limehouse Basin. 

Amazing roof garden of tomatoes and herbs. 

Detail of the houseboat roof garden.  

Football over Limehouse Basin. 

Love the way the brambles are growing over this building. 

Away from the basin, Limehouse is obviously working class. Here's Commercial Road, across the street from where I was staying. Hung Tou is actually pretty decent for a take out. But it's another place that glares at you if you speak Mandarin. 

Popular Cafe doesn't look too popular. 

There's an amazing row of storefronts with hand-drawn signs on Commercial Road. They're all squatted apparently. 

Cable Street is known for a big confrontation against fascists in the 1930s. Now, there are two fantastic music venues. Jamboree is a block from where I was staying.  Here's an amazing cornet player (and a cheeky fiddler) at Ewan Bleach's Thursday night shindig, which not only features fantastic jazz but also terrific hoofers that  blow away any swing night I've seen in NYC. 

Jamboree is part of the Cable Street Studios, a gated complex of artist studios. 

Striped snogging couple across from Jamboree. 

Scene on another night at Jamboree. See the Peel Away on the wall? Can't help but think about my ex putting Peel Away on the transom window above the hallway in my old 11th St pad to remove the paint and forgetting to peel the damn thing away, so the transom looked even worse for the next five years. Probably the same thing happened here.

On the other end of Cable Street closer to Whitechapel is Wilton's Music Hall, the only music hall from the 1850s still standing. The place survives because of massive community effort. This is the gorgeous stage area. 

Here's a view of London's weird skyline on the way to Canary Wharf from Limehouse. Looks like something illustrated by Dr. Seuss. 

Canary Wharf scene. 

Canary Wharf basically feels like an upscale area in California. Too manicured for my tastes. Here's a selfie in front of a restaurant sign proclaiming "Since 1248." I suddenly imagined Monty Python-like knights stopping for chicken on their way to the Crusades. 

Tompkins Square Park, 25 Years Ago

On the night of the 2003 blackout, I was sitting in Tompkins Square Park with my then boyfriend, enjoying the festivities that always spontaneously erupt during any emergency in New York City. We were in the old bandshell area, saying hello to people and enjoying the nice campfire glow from several garbage cans that had been set on fire. Several shirtless 20-something guys were dancing around one of the garbage fires, whooping like happy monkeys liberated from the zoo. A policeman finally ambled by and told them that he had to douse the fire. “Awww!” whined the kids and then they all began pleading, “Not now! Not now!”

My boyfriend and I burst out laughing, both of us flashing back to 1988, when the kids in the park would have been shouting, “Pigs out of the park! Who’s fucking park? OUR fucking park!” Where did all that anger, all that conviction, that sense of ownership, go? In the new New York, the puerile cry is, “Not now, dad! We’re having too much fun!“

Police Riot by Erik Drooker. 

It’s been 25 years since East Village residents stood up against 400 policemen in a heroic last stand against gentrification in the neighborhood.

The neighborhood was completely different then. Picture being constantly accosted by drug dealers on the corner. "Sense? Sense?" they would say. Or the names of various heroin brands, "Presidential? Poison?" Lines of scruffy people scratching their faces snaked out of bodegas that had nothing but a few dusty Goya cans in the window. Every so often you'd see some cops making a sweep of arrests, but most of the time, drug dealing went on right out in the open. Many buildings were hulking burned-out shells. Whole blocks were comprised of crumbled heaps of rubble.

It was like the Wild West, completely beyond the law. There were no regulations about anything. Depending on who you are, this could be really nerve-wracking or incredibly liberating. Shoot outs happened on the streets, drugs were sold openly, a thieves market flourished on St. Marks Place. But you could also do a show in the bandshell anytime you wanted. Or walk down the street in nothing but your skivvies and glitter in your hair. Or turn that empty store into a performance space. And you could live pretty decently on $800 a month. Which is why the neighborhood became a magnet for artists and radical thinkers from everywhere in the world.

So when white flight began to reverse itself, the first place people made a beeline toward was the East Village. In 1986, the Christadora House was converted into the first luxury condominium with a doorman in the neighborhood. Situated on the poorer side of Tompkins Square Park, it had formerly been a community center and settlement house, so it became a target of a lot of hostility and a symbol of gentrification. You just couldn't help but notice how the upper-middle class people who had started moving in were scared by the homeless people in the park and the lawlessness in the neighborhood. And they had the money and clout to do something about it. By 1988, there were enough of them to pressure the Community Board to shut down the park.

Then as now, Tompkins Square Park is the heart and soul of the neighborhood. Sure, there were plenty of problems with the park in the 1980s, but it wasn't just a destitute wasteland that no one in their right mind would enter. It was just poor, full of Latino kids from the nearby projects, and homeless people, who had erected a camp on the southeastern end. I remember lazy warm nights sitting on tire swings in the Avenue B playground with my high school friends, dancing with old Latino guys to the rhythm of conga players, performing in the bandshell to hundreds of spectators including families with kids. So when a sign appeared in Tompkins Square Park that police would be enforcing a 1AM curfew, many people were outraged, viewing it as a takeover by the wealthier people in the neighborhood and a trick to evict the homeless people. On July 30, the police announced on megaphones that they were closing the park and clashed with people who refused to leave. Incensed, neighborhood activists planned a bigger and more organized protest the following Saturday, August 6.

The evening began with a few hundred people marching around the park carrying banners that read GENTRIFICATION IS CLASS WAR and chanting, “Who’s fucking park? OUR fucking park!” About a hundred policemen were stationed in the park, about a dozen of them mounted on horses. Someone started setting off M80 firecrackers, but despite all the expletives and explosions, it was actually pretty tame. Videos made by Paul Garrin and Clayton Patterson, however, reveal that many of the police officers already weren’t wearing badges or had taped them over. They were apparently prepped for a brawl.

At 12:30, when it began to get close to the curfew, police tried to shut the park down and things began to get heated. Bottles were thrown and someone was arrested. Then at 1AM, the mounted policemen suddenly charged at the crowd. The commissioner called for reinforcements and their arrival added to the pandemonium. The police indiscriminately began beating people up, whether they were protesting or just simply passing by. “Move along, black nigger bitch,” a policeman said as they pounced on Tisha Pryors and her friend, Downtown reporter Dean Kuipers.  “I’m going to crack open your skull,” a policeman waving a nightstick shouted at media activist Paul Garrin, who continued to videotape as they grabbed him and threw him against a wall. A hundred people ended up in the hospital in skirmishes that persisted until 6AM, but the police were unable to close down the park.

Within the next week, over a hundred of complaints of police brutality were logged. “The police panicked and were beating up bystanders who had done nothing wrong and were just observing,'' stated Allen Ginsburg in The New York Times. The ranking police chief was later and the precinct captain was temporarily relieved of his post. The incident is called the Tompkins Square Park riot, but it's important to remember that it was the police who rioted. They were so out of hand that they radicalized a whole bunch of people who had never considered themselves particularly political.

Photo from Tompkins Square Park before the police rioted. By Q. Sakamaki from
his fantastic photo book on the riot published by PowerHouse Books. 

I wasn't there that night. I had spent the afternoon performing on 10th Street at the first show for Theater for the New City's summer street theater, which that year was about an evicted family squatting a Coney Island funhouse. We all went to get a drink at Bandito's on Second Avenue afterwards so I was about three blocks from the melee and missed it. Though I do remember seeing people running past and wondering what was happening. After hearing about the incident in the park from various people, I turned up at 7A Cafe the next night to see what was going on.

The place was packed and it seemed just like any other night. No one seemed to pay attention to the television on the corner of the bar but when an anchorperson began talking about Tompkins Square Park, the bartender turned off the music and amped up the volume. In a flash, the entire restaurant stopped talking and stood up, watching the news report in silence. It was one of the most beautiful moments of solidarity I've ever witnessed. We were all in it together – it was our park, our neighborhood at stake. When Mayor Koch announced that he was reversing the curfew, we cheered and hugged each other. Then the bartender turned the music back on and we went back to dinner. Life went on as usual. For a few more years.

In 1991, the cops descended on the park once more and this time, they were able to close it down. Maybe everyone happened to be out of town for Memorial Day. Maybe the energy of the neighborhood was all spent by then. Maybe the gentrification that had begun in the mid-1980s had already cemented into a resinous gloss of triviality and conformism. When the park re-opened a year later, the bandshell had been removed and there was a volleyball net in its place. Which always seems to me to be some weird irony. Gone was the opportunity for ad-hoc theater and music events in the park. But we can all play volleyball! Spontaneous raucous events in the East Village did persist for a few more years – people continued to crawl through the fence for late night parties at Dry Dock Pool and meander across to the East River on Sunday nights for salsa dancing and illegal gambling – but the closing of the park was like the taming of the West. A vital part of the East Village spirit of resistance died.

This coming week, several events will commemorate the 25^th Anniversary of the riot in Tompkins Square Park.  Those of you who weren't there can get a rare glimpse of the good old bad old days. And those of us who were there can look back on that summer 25 years ago when Tompkins Square Park was still our fucking park. 

Event Listings:

• The Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space (MorUs) is sponsoring a film festival in their space and several in several gardens. Filmmakers will be in attendance, some of these films are real gems. 
• A facebook page of all the events - the panel discussion at Theater 80 on August 6th will be interesting, especially with a slideshow of War in the Neighborhood, the great graphic novel by Seth Tobocman. 

Videos of the Tompkins Square Park police riot:

• Paul Garrin’s video take on Tompkins Square Park – “Little Brother is now watching Big Brother”
• Paul Garrin inadvertently films himself getting beat by the cops 
• Clayton Patterson on Tompkins Square Park 

Articles on Tompkins Square Park police riot:

• Melee in Tompkins Square Park - NY Times 8/14/88 
• Findings on Tompkins Square Prompt 2 Police Supervisors to Lose Posts - NY Times, 8/25/88
• Paul Garrin's account of the evening - The 1988 Tompkins Square Park Riot: A Video Point of View on TacticalMediaFiles.net

I Heart Amsterdam

Mention Amsterdam and the first thing anyone thinks is sex and drugs. I kept getting advice like go to such-and-such place for the best weed or don't take pictures of the prostitutes in the Red Light District. But legalized sex and marijuana overshadow what the place is really about. Which can probably best be expressed by the Dutch term gezellig. It's a word that's considered rather untranslatable in English. Here's a whole page attempting to define it. And here. But basically, I think gezellig is what everyone who was around in the East Village in the 1980s misses - a sense of togetherness, of comraderie, of homespun warmth.

In Amsterdam, I kept feeling like it was the 1980s all over again. Part of this feeling was probably due to me staying with Walter at the Vrankrijk, one of the oldest squats in Amsterdam. He's a friend of my friend Joel who had lived in Amsterdam for two years back in the early 1990s. One night, Walter and I made pizza together and he put on a VHS tape to share some of the performance pieces that he and Joel used to do together. He was surprised that instead, the VHS tape began with half an hour of footage in which he ran around with friends asking people on the street how much money they make - the ultimate forbidden question. I mean, people will answer compromising questions about their sex life before they will admit how much money they make. And of course, I think this is a taboo that really should be confronted. So there I was, enjoying a simple night of making food with a friend, watching a crappy VHS tape of something hilariously radical - I was getting flashbacks that definitely did not derive from any substances legal or illegal. I began wondering if home wasn't necessarily a place or a community, but a time period or perhaps just a quality. Maybe gezellig can just be simply translated as homey.

Joel did appear in the end - in a wacky mystery thriller about foiling a dastardly plot by the Dutch Santa's black helpers. Dutch Santa? Black helpers? Yeah. If you don't know about Sinterklaass and Zwarte Pieten (or even if you do), you should listen to David Sedaris read from his hilarious story 6-8 Black Men.

We also went and saw The Night of the Hunter at De Slang (The Snake), one of about six other squats across the street. The building is pretty iconic - I've seen photos of it before in books, maybe in Robert Neuwirth's Shadow Cities - it has a painting of a giant spotted snake with fangs. While the squatters in the Vrankrijk managed to buy their building, I learned that De Slang and all the squats on the other side of the street were threatened with eviction. Ah, shades of the East Village. It seems that the corporate powers are beginning an attempt to disembowel communities in Amsterdam, same as they did in New York City. Maybe the squatters in Amsterdam will find a way of foiling them. Unlike in NYC, they seem to have support in the general population, probably since most squats seem to have some kind of artistic venue that is open to the public.

After the film, we ended up at Cafe the Minds, where Walter works, a bar decorated with a dozen hanging pairs of combat boots and a giant oar. Most nights ended at Cafe the Minds, actually. The first night, a very drunk guy sidled and lurched up next to us and asked Walter in Dutch what my name was. After seeing the guy try to hit on every other girl in the bar, Walter was mortified enough to toss him out.  And then there was one night when I sat down next to someone else wearing an IDFA badge and he exclaimed, "Oh, I thought I would avoid all the IDFA people here!" It turned out that he's a pretty well-known Iranian filmmaker.

I would have liked to have spent more time getting to know the city, but I was really there for IDFAcademy, and had a pretty intense four days of workshops that started at 10AM and ended with drinks that lasted until 2AM. I had already been partying since Paris so the entire trip I felt "rough as a boot" as one Dutch filmmaker whom I became friends with put it. Plus I was pretty darn broke. I never did get to tour the canals on a boat. Or see the Rijkmuseum. Or visit the Red Light District. But after these last two years when I've been despairing that NYC is at a dead end, out of gas, end of the line, it was great to remember what it used to feel like. And so very unexpected to find a place that has managed to keep its beautiful collective spirit, the missing ingredient in the new New York that used to make everything so possible.

Pictures of Amsterdam are here.
My IDFA experiences are on the ALMOST HOME: TAIWAN website.

Hurrication in NYC

Just wanted to post a few pictures from NYC post-hurricane. A beautiful time of people coming together to share resources. One of the reasons I love the Lower East Side. No where else like it. 

The few places that had generators offered neighbors electricity to charge their phones, at least until they started running out of gas... This charging station was at TNC. There was a constant line of at least ten people, I was told.

Free tofu at Commodities!

Free ramen at Rai Rai Ken!

Free curry at Sapporo!

Jeff and I chow down on some free curry. Delicious.

The lit-up deli is like a beacon in the dark East Village.

How gorgeous the restaurants were, all quiet and lit by candles.

Avenue A in the dark.

Avenue A restaurant Flea Market in the dark.

Blackout Tourists: Halloween Adventures in Darkville

It was already dusk when my friend Sheridan and I climbed the ramp onto the Williamsburg Bridge, walking in the opposite direction of most people, who were headed to Brooklyn for power and a shower. "Why are they going to the East Village?" I heard someone say. But I had been feeling  cut off for days, obsessively keeping track of friends in Loisaida as the East River overflowed and turned Avenue C into a river. Emergencies bring out the best in the East Village and I was really missing being a part of the neighborhood's beautiful big-hearted spirit. As my friend Joel said, "It's like Burning Man meets a Rainbow Gathering!"

It was also like the early 1800s. We were on our way to meet Joel on the darkened corner of Avenue A and 10th Street. Buzzers didn't work, he said, and neither did cell phones, so we were back to those days when you made a fixed appointment to meet up with someone. Of course, we were already half an hour late. As we passed the halfway point on the bridge and there were no more lights, my cell phone rang. Apparently, Joel had scrounged up a phone and plugged in his moribund landline, which he had kept for emergencies just like this. But the phone cut off just as he told me to meet him at his home instead.

A dark lower Manhattan from the Brooklyn side of the Williamsburg Bridge. 

Delancey Street without lights. 

I repeatedly tried calling him as we got off the bridge but the phone refused to cooperate. Apparently, in Darkville, there were no phones. There were also no traffic lights. A policeman in a yellow slicker with reflective stripes was directing cars as they came off the bridge onto Delancey Street. We turned up Clinton Street while I continued to dial Joel's number. But when I finally got through to him, a friend answered the phone and said that he had gone out on the street corner to try to meet me.

So I gave up calling and concentrated on getting to Avenue A as quickly as possible. As he had told me, the Lower East Side seemed peaceful and beautiful, bathed in darkness. A few restaurants were open, serving dinner by candlelight. No music, limited food, lots of wine. I had heard that earlier, restaurants were giving away food for free. It made me think of the novel Germanie Lacerteux by the Goncourt Brothers, which begins with a description of a lavish communal dinner on the streets of Paris at the height of the horror in the French Revolution.

When we got to Houston Street, I was surprised that there were no policemen at all. It certainly wasn't like the blackout in 2004, when cops swarmed around everywhere, putting red flares in the middle of each intersection. A few cars crept by warily as we scurried across the avenue, Sheridan frantically waved her blinking light like a kid trying to do tricks with a yoyo.

Only one restaurant was open on Avenue B and on the normally busy strip of Avenue A between 6th and 10th Street , flickering yellow candlelight could be seen in only three establishments  - the bar part of Sidewalk Cafe, Niagara, and the relatively new taco joint La Lucha. Most of the familiar old bars and restaurants that had been there since the 1980s were dark and shuttered - Benny's, 7A, Lucy's, Odessa, Ray's. Tompkins Square Park was shut tight. But as we passed by, there was the unmistakable rustle and squeak every New Yorker knows. The headlights of a passing car revealed that behind the park gate at 8th Street, a generous misguided soul had scattered birdseed that was being consumed by a hundred hungry rats.

Joel was not on the corner of Avenue A and 10th, so we proceeded to his apartment. But the buzzer didn't work and neither did my phone, so we milled around outside uncertainly until someone who had been walking his dog let us in. "Joel?" I called when we got to the courtyard of his rear building. "Vicky?" he responded from somewhere in the dark. We heard footsteps and saw a light weaving around in the dark, as he descended from the third floor to open the door.

Joel was in the middle of washing his dishes. We opened a bottle of wine as he told us that a friend was going to be cooking a huge dinner on 10th Street. At 7:30, he ran downstairs to let another friend in. "I'll finish washing your dishes," I volunteered and went into his kitchen. After a few minutes fiddling with his faucet in puzzlement, I realized that the dishes had to be rinsed with water that was boiling on the stove since nothing but cold water came from the tap.

Joel came upstairs with Monica, who was wearing eye make-up that looked like an expressionistic mask. I couldn't tell what she was - a sexy raccoon from the 1920s? - but I wished I had a costume. So far, she and Sheridan were the only two people whom I saw dressed for Halloween. Sheridan was a Zoo Creeper from Killema Zoo, a costume she had created for a haunted house in a park she works at.  I hadn't had time to put together a costume before the storm hit and I felt rather lame in their company. "Would you like a trick or a treat?" Monica asked archly. "A treat!" Sheridan squealed. Monica instructed us to rummage through a giant brown leather bag and pick something. Sheridan pulled out a glittery skull made of styrofoam. I got a tampon.

Joel finished washing his dishes and began to put on his Halloween costume, a dapper outfit from the early 1900s. I wanted to say hello to a few friends whom I hadn't heard from and Monica also had a friend she wanted to visit, so we all told Joel that we would meet him at his friend's place for dinner in about fifteen minutes. "Just holler Bianca when you get there," he informed us.

We parted ways with Monica on Avenue A and set out for my old apartment building on 11th Street and Avenue C. When we arrived, we saw that a generator was running, apparently pumping water out of the basement of the building. The door was open, so we entered and immediately noticed how damp and musty the building smelled. The first floor had quite obviously been flooded. Later, I heard that there had been a river between 8th Street and 14th Street on Avenue C, which was quit natural since it was all landfill on marshy ponds here anyway. Picking our way up in the dark, we knocked on Apartment 16 and spent a few minutes catching up with my old friend Sense, who was huddled in the dark with a few candles. He told me his wife and daughter were in Brooklyn.

Then we walked down Avenue C and found a cook-out happening in front of C-Squat, one of the remaining squats in the neighborhood and the only one that still hosted raucous semi-legal punk rock shows. Jerry the Peddler was outside with a bunch of the usual punks and crusties. I asked about the museum that had just opened on the ground floor of the squat and he confirmed that the basement had flooded and they had lost some artifacts. We also stopped at my friend Chip's apartment, but he wasn't there so I left a note for him on his door. Then we doubled back up Avenue B and ran into a group of my son's friends in front of Sheen's Deli, which apparently is selling candles in the dark for twice as much as usual.

Sheridan the Zoo Creeper in conversation with Jerry the Peddler in front of C-Squat. 

On the corner of 8th and C, Darkville. 

Making a call  to Chip the old-fashioned way. 

As we arrived on 10th Street, we heard someone yelling, "Bianca!"  It was Joel, outside with a friend, who was on her way to the alternative Halloween Parade. Monica had not yet arrived. I was intrigued with the idea of an unofficial Halloween Parade but we were hungry. Bianca came down eventually and led us up to her apartment, where we had a fantastic dinner of coconut shrimp and fish with two other friends. When they found out that Sheridan and I had come from Williamsburg they said, "Oh, you're blackout tourists!" We all moaned about eating so much in the past few days but that didn't prevent us from polishing our plates. Dinner was punctuated with Joel occasionally leaning out the window shouting, "Monica???" She never showed up.

Joel in costume at Bianca's for dinner. 

We eat like kings in Darkville. 

A Darkville dinner. 

After dinner, we hitched a cab back to Williamsburg and found normality rather strange. People were in costume and bars were full. Halloween as usual. I wished we had seen the alternative parade but it was fun going to the Monster Mash at Glasslands, where the top costumes included a guy dressed as a bloody vagina and a girl in a giant lobster costume made of red felt. I still felt stupid for not having a costume. Someone asked, "What are you?" I brandished my camera and said, "A blackout tourist!"

Alana Amram on Halloween.  

Halloween at Glasslands. 

Lady and a lizard. 

Mary and Jesus DJ-ing. 

Outside Glasslands at the Monster Mash.